Franchise

In the NFL, success doesn't transfer easily. Joe Banner, the longtime Eagles president who stepped down this week, said he hopes to put together an investment group that can buy a struggling franchise, with partners who will allow him to run the team and attempt to turn it around, much as he helped do in Philadelphia. There is a long list of NFL coaches and executives, though, who have struggled to duplicate their initial success at a new location. Carmen Policy, a salary-cap wizard who helped power the 49ers to a championship, moved to Cleveland after being forced out of San Francisco.

With both the Flyers and Sixers recently concluding their seasons, with the Phillies mired in a strangely mediocre campaign and the Eagles still trying to figure out what the hell happened last year, it seems like a good time to take stock—to examine the current state of Philadelphia's four major sports franchises. To do so, SportsWeek asked Daily News writers Rich Hofmann, Les Bowen, Frank Seravalli and Bob Cooney to answer a simple question: How close (or far) are each of the respective teams from contending for a championship?

New England receiver Wes Welker said Tuesday he has signed the $9.5 million tender offer that came along with being designated the team's franchise player. Welker made the announcement on Twitter. He said he loves the game and his teammates and "hopefully doing the right thing gets the right results. " A four-time Pro Bowl selection, Welker led the NFL with 122 receptions and was second in the league with 1,569 yards receiving. Welker, 30, is only the second receiver to catch at least 120 passes in two seasons.

ARTHUR RACKLEY said DePaul House helped him clean up his life. Now he's helping to return the favor to the support center for the city's homeless. "This place is all about giving guys like me a second chance," he said. "When they asked me to come back and work for them, how could I say no?" Rackley is one of seven members of Immaculate Cleaning, a janitorial franchise started by the DePaul House last week. The franchise operates out of DePaul's office in Germantown and employs homeless men who come to the center for shelter, counseling and career-placement services.

I KNOW THAT I'm one of the few people outside of the Phillies front office who believes that general manager Ruben Amaro Jr. played his hand wrong. This isn't where anyone expected the Phillies to be - not 11-12 and a rung out of the cellar in the National League East. But as frustrating as things presently are, I look at how the Phillies arrived here, and I ask myself, what could Amaro have realistically done differently? I'll get hundreds of suggestions, and if change in real-life Major League Baseball were as easy as it is in Fantasy League Baseball or arm-chair general managing, 99 percent of them would be right.

IT WAS ABOUT 30 minutes before tipoff of the Sixers' regular-season home finale Tuesday night. Rich Pickens sat in Section 108 of the Wells Fargo Center, about 30 rows from the court, wearing a vintage Bobby Jones jersey. He was virtually alone. By the start of the Sixers' 102-97 loss to the Indiana Pacers, Pickens had plenty of other fans around. It was a welcome change for Pickens, a season ticketholder for 12 years. It's been a renaissance year for the Sixers and their attempt to reconnect with their tepid fan base.

One glimpse of Matt McLaughlin's blue eyes and bulging biceps, and it's obvious why the 6-foot-2, 225-pound senior tight end at West Chester University considered himself a perfect fit for the job posted by College Hunks Hauling Junk . Owner Michael Ort thought so, too, making McLaughlin one of his first hires. But then he also hired Travis Weaver, who at 5-foot-8 and 125 pounds has never been likened to a hunk, the West Chester sophomore with boyish looks bravely admitted last week.

  Top officials at Philadelphia International Airport say they were never informed that the son of former State Sen. Vincent J. Fumo had acquired a share in an airport cheesesteak franchise, but they're not sure they care. "We probably will take a look at it," James Tyrrell, city deputy director of aviation, said in a telephone interview last week. "We really need to discuss it. I don't know if this is something we should be overly concerned about. " Vincent E. Fumo II filed suit in Common Pleas Court on March 29, complaining that he had paid $150,000 in 2009 for a 30 percent share of the cheesesteak business, but had received less than half the return promised - "a guaranteed return of $50,000 a year for every year that the restaurant was in business.

PITTSBURGH - You have to see it to bereave it. And if you do, it will make you realize just how fortunate Phillies fans have been for the last decade. The comatose state of the baseball team from the western end of Pennsylvania is one of the saddest sports stories of the 21st century. The Pittsburgh Pirates, a franchise that employed Honus Wagner, Roberto Clemente, Willie Stargell, and Danny Murtaugh, has been an unwatchable mess for nearly two decades. The team that beat the New York Yankees in an unforgettable 1960 World Series and captured two more titles by beating the Baltimore Orioles in 1971 and 1979 has now gone a major-league record 19 straight seasons without posting a winning record.

Magic Johnson is a savvy businessman, and he leads the group that just spent more than $2 billion to buy the Los Angeles Dodgers. So which of these things is true? The shock waves from that outlandish sale price are going to reach all the way to the Phillies on the East Coast and across sports to the NFL. More immediately, though, the sale underscores that it is almost impossible to fail financially as the owner of a sports franchise - no matter how awful or incompetent you are. Consider Frank McCourt, a Bostonian who made his personal money by buying cheap South Boston real estate and turning it into commuter parking lots.